Friday, January 10, 2014

God enjoying a renaissance

Despite pews sitting empty and churches closing due to dwindling membership, a significant number of Danes still say they believe in some kind of higher power.

According to a YouGov survey undertaken for Søndagsavisen newspaper,
41 percent of people believe in a god while a further 15 percent said
that they wouldn't reject the existence of God.

Peter Lüchau, a sociologist and lecturer at the University of
Copenhagen, said that religion is not something Danes are overly vocal
about.

“Danes are surprisingly religious, but it’s not something that most
Danes actively relate to. Religion has become a set of norms that is not
flaunted and something that people have with themselves and their
families,” Lüchau told Søndagsavisen.

It also appears that Danes become more religious the older they get.
Fifty percent of people over the age of 50 are believers, compared to 32
percent of people aged 18-34.

A spiritual renaissance Lüchau said that
the survey results showed that religious and spiritual thought is once
again gathering some momentum after experiencing a bit of a national
crisis.

“In the 60’s we expected religion to become extinct. People believed
that if we became effective enough and had enough science, we could
explain everything,” Lüchau said.

“But slowly people came to believe
that science does not hold all the answers and now we have reached that
point again where people look to religion for answers to the fundamental
questions in life.”

Less religious in the capital
The survey also revealed that women are more religious and more likely
to believe in life after death than men. Some 45 percent of women
believe in God, compared to 37 percent of men, and 47 percent of women
believe in an afterlife, compared to just 26 percent of men.

The
survey also found that people were more religious in the rural areas of
the nation. In the Copenhagen and northern Zealand regions, just 33
percent of people said that they were religious, compared to the around
45 percent of people in Jutland and on Funen.

Atheists on the rise
The news follows in the wake of Statistics Denmark’s revelations in 2013
that while 79.1 percent of the population of Denmark are members of the
Church of Denmark (folkekirken), just three percent of the population regularly attends church services.

Moreover, a TNS Gallup survey for Berlingske newspaper in October showed that one fifth of the Danish population are atheists.

According to a 2012 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public
Life, 16 percent of the world's population – 1.1 billion people – are
atheists, making atheism the third-largest 'belief' on the planet.